Minus 40 or lower. You figure out whether it matters if minus 40 is F or C. I heard they were in sneakers and jeans and thin coats in moderately deep snow. The miracle is the guy that survived after walking about 10 miles. I’ve been out in that weather in dead calm. It doesn’t take long for you to feel it, and a metal car is not a good shelter.
There’s a really interesting Jack London short story about a guy who falls through the ice to his waist in Alaska or the Yukon, and then struggles to get a fire going before his fingers go numb. The dog, meanwhile, is clever enough to stay out of reach so he can’t warm his hands in the dog by slicing open its guts.
When I see a movie like the original Superman where a now-powerless Christopher Reeves is walking down the Alaska Highway in a windbreaker, I know the scriptwriters have never experienced real cold.
Hypothermia kicks in at 95 F which isn’t much below 98.6 F.
In the case of snow, wet clothes, often from overexertion can accelerate the loss. Windchill adds to this, but it doesn’t take much to think that “just 5 more minutes” and you will be unstuck, find a house or…
By the time you reach 95 F lethargy and confusion is already kicked in and decision making just gets worse the colder your body gets. If you get much colder than 83 F the risk of heart attack goes way up and if your core gets below 68 F Brain function stops. Typically your will expire before anything but your exterior appendages suffer frost bite.
Most people aren’t told to look out for the 'umbles ( stumbles, mumbles, fumbles, and grumbles ) when out in the cold or don’t see it as a life threatening.
If you are out in the cold and notice them in yourself or another you have to stop then and there and take care of it or it will probably just be too late.
It isn’t painful but it is still terrifying. To make a long story short, my best friend and I decided to try to ride rapid floodwaters in the winter in a very small boat as a thrill. Then, we lost the boat and had to try to try to walk out of waist deep, very cold water for hours while losing function after function. The only reason we lived was because he kept lying to me telling me that he knew exactly where we were and help was just around the corner. Neither one of us could walk when we reached and edge and found a house with someone willing to help. He was completely incoherent by that point.
A very smart local college student here in Massachusetts decided to take a shortcut home in May last year through a local swamp late at night. He never made it because he got hypothermia and made poor decisions even though it was a fairly short walk. It took days and teams of people to find his body. He wasn’t even that far from home. I already knew what happened to him because I lived through it.
The coffee story is a bit of an exaggeration. It doesn’t freeeze instantly in the air even at -40 C (Yes, I have tried it and most of just ends up on the ground) Some of it will vaporize creating a nice effect for a youtube video but most of it will hit the ground still as a liquid and then freeze.
Although in the case of that woman who was “frozen solid” in Minnesota in the 80s, I’m wondering was she literally frozen like a popsicle, or did her muscles just cramp up or something making her appear that way. Because it’s my understanding that the problem with actually freezing a person is that the human body is mostly water. And water, when frozen, expands and forms ice crystals which damage tissue at a cellular level. Basically that’s how you get frostbite.
They say freezing to death is just like falling asleep…in a meat locker.
During the crazy heat of summer, before I had an a/c, or even nowadays when I’m in the neighborhood, I would head for a meat distributor–one of the last in the Meatpacking District in NYC–and hang out in their huge walk through, changing aisles when I got bored.
My parents mentioned going to a movie theatre – most of them were air conditioned (or air cooled) long before other places, and you could stay for hours. Some even operated qall night, so people would actually sleep in them.
The body shuts down circulation to the extremities, to preserve heat for the vital functions (heart & brain). So they may survive, if rescued in time, but lose many fingers, toes, hands, etc. to severe frostbite.
Also, all such medical info is a statistical summary of what happens on average. There are always exceptions to that – some people who survive despite freezing conditions, and others who succumb in moderate conditions. Doctors always go with the odds, but hope that their patient beats 'em this time.
During the crazy heat of summer, before I had an a/c, or even nowadays when I’m in the neighborhood, I would head for a meat distributor–one of the last in the Meatpacking District in NYC–and hang out in their huge walk through, changing aisles when I got bored.